Here Be Dragons (Legendary #4)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

What we actually got was a permanent ceiling of bruised purple-gray that seemed to press down on the valley, clouds that were shot through with threads of greenish lightning that never touched the ground.

The static electricity was so thick that I’d stopped wearing anything synthetic, so my fleece jacket hung unused in the hall closet, replaced by layers of cotton and wool that didn’t crackle every time I moved.

And behind it all was a pressure in my skull that had nothing to do with barometric readings, a constant, low-grade hum that told me the veil between worlds had worn thin as old cotton and showed no signs of mending, even if the portal had seemed utterly quiescent lately.

My coffee had gone lukewarm, but I drank it anyway, wincing at the bitter edge and trying not to think about what the wrongness meant.

The wind chimes on the Carmichaels’ back porch had been silent for days.

I’d noticed their absence the way you notice a clock that’s stopped ticking, a hole in the soundscape where something familiar should be.

The air was too still and too heavy, pressing down on Silver Hollow like a held breath.

Even the birds had gone quiet. I hadn’t heard a stellar jay scream in over a week, and the usual dawn chorus of sparrows and wrens and finches had dwindled to isolated chirps that died quickly in the weighted air.

The people in town had noticed, too. At the grocery store three days ago, I’d overheard Beverly Fernsby telling Eliza Cartwright that her joints hadn’t ached this badly since the Loma Prieta earthquake back in 1989.

At the gas station, the kid behind the counter had complained about headaches that no amount of Advil could touch.

Nobody said the word “magic,” of course.

The women in my family had kept Silver Hollow’s secrets for more than a hundred years, and no one who lived there knew what the forest outside town actually hid.

But I saw the way people glanced at the sky and the way they hurried inside before dusk.

They knew something was wrong. They just didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what that wrongness really was.

Behind me, I heard Ben’s footsteps on the stairs. They had a cadence I’d learned over the past two months, the way he stepped over the third stair because the board creaked. He’d tried to fix it twice already, but the house had other ideas.

The old Craftsman had been standing since 1915, and it pretty much did what it wanted.

The third stair creaked, the kitchen faucet dripped if you didn’t turn the handle exactly right, and the window in the office on the ground floor stuck unless you lifted it at a particular angle.

My grandmother had known all these quirks and had accommodated them with the same patient acceptance she’d applied to everything in her life.

My mother had been the same way. Now it was just me, learning the house’s language one minor annoyance at a time.

“You’re up early.” Ben’s voice sounded slightly husky, hoarse from not enough sleep. “Or did you not go to bed?”

“I slept.” Four hours, maybe five at the most, but that had been long enough for me to dream about fire in colors that didn’t exist and wake with the taste of ash on my tongue. “The pressure woke me.”

He came over so he could stand next to me in front of the kitchen window, close enough that I could feel the familiar warmth of his bioelectric field brushing against mine.

The scars on my forearms — hidden now beneath the sleeves of my flannel shirt — responded with a faint tingle, the dimensional burns recognizing their mirror image on his skin.

When I reached for his hand, our fingers interlaced, and a soft pulse of blue-white light flickered between our palms before settling into something steadier and warmer.

Two months had passed since the incident with the phoenix, since I’d merged with the creature and burned away shadow corruption…

and nearly burned away myself in the process.

That whole time, we’d had weekly healing sessions with the unicorn and seen how the angry silver circuits on our skin faded to something closer to fern-frond patterns, a delicate tracery that could pass for elaborate tattoos if no one looked too closely.

During the healing process, I’d tried to learn the boundaries of this new existence — my expanded sensing range, the way I could feel approaching vehicles from over a mile out, the constant low murmur of the global portal network humming in the back of my mind like a radio left on in another room.

All that time had been spent with Ben. Every day, I’d woken up next to him and felt how our electromagnetic fields synchronized when we touched…and every day we’d built something that felt dangerously close to normal in a life that had been anything but.

He’d moved in officially only a week after the phoenix had been reborn and had returned to its world beyond the portal.

It had been a natural progression, after all.

Two people who’d gone through what the two of us had would never willingly be apart.

So he’d canceled his agreement with Nancy Petterson to rent the small cottage on her property and moved his clothes into my closet, while his research equipment had taken over most of the ground-floor office, although he’d brought his own desk rather than take over my grandmother’s enormous rolltop.

His coffee maker sat on the counter, superseding the old cowboy coffeepot I’d always used, and two mugs went into the dishwasher each morning.

Now two toothbrushes rested in the holder in the upstairs bath, and his books always seemed to be scattered across the living room, no matter how much I chided him about putting them away in one of the built-in bookcases.

So many small domesticities that added up to a life shared.

I’d expected the house to feel more crowded with him in it.

Instead, it felt less empty. The rooms that had echoed with absence since February — since my mother and grandmother walked into the forest and didn’t come back — still held their ghosts, but now someone was living in them, too, someone whose warmth cut through the cold spots.

My mother’s purple and turquoise scarf still hung on the coat rack by the door.

I’d considered putting it away a dozen times, thinking I should tuck it into the cedar chest in the attic with the other things I couldn’t bear to look at.

Somehow, though, I couldn’t make myself do it.

The scarf was proof that Josie Lowell was still alive somewhere beyond the portal, trapped in another dimension with my grandmother, waiting for the day I’d be strong enough to bring them home.

“It’s getting worse,” Ben said. As always, his voice was calm. Then again, I supposed someone who’d survived an encounter with a corrupted phoenix needed a situation to get positively catastrophic before they truly lost their cool.

“The lunar cycle’s broken.” I watched another thread of green lightning crawl across the cloud cover, slow as honey.

“The new moon was four days ago, so the portals should be sealed by now. Everything should be quiet.” I pulled a breath and let it out slowly.

“But they haven’t. The veil’s been thin for three weeks straight, and it’s not cycling anymore. Something’s overriding the pattern.”

His hand tightened around mine. “The Dragon.”

I’d told him what I sensed — what I’d been sensing ever since the storms started.

A presence lay far beneath Silver Hollow, vast and old and stirring from a sleep measured in centuries.

The portal network had been stable for a hundred and seventy years, ever since my ancestor Mary Welling first encountered the unicorn and the family compact to protect the forest and its portal began.

It had remained stable through two World Wars, through the logging boom and the logging bust, through DAPI’s interference and Dr. Sonya Rosenthal’s attempts to weaponize powers she could never comprehend.

Now, though, something was waking up…something that made the phoenix look like a candle flame held up against a forest fire.

I hadn’t known about the Dragon until recently.

It was something buried in my grandmother’s journals, something we’d only found because Ben had taken it upon himself to digitize the rest of those diaries and make them searchable and sortable.

Where he’d found the time in between keeping his YouTube channel afloat and covering for me at the pet store so I could finish my practicum hours at Hope Hayakawa’s vet clinic in town, I wasn’t sure.

But that was where I’d found it.

Ignis Aeternus…everlasting fire. A brief mention written when my grandmother was probably around the same age I was now, saying only that the Dragon was not like the other creatures that came and went through the portals.

Griffins and unicorns and phoenixes — and manticores, and pegasi — had been seen by the women of my family and then had returned to their own worlds on the other side of the portal, but the Dragon was here.

The Dragon had always been here.

When I’d read that passage, I’d recalled a conversation with my mother when I was probably around twelve and I’d asked her why dragons were never seen in the woods. She’d been quiet for a moment, and then she’d said,

“Dragons are different.”

That was all she’d said, and I hadn’t pressed her, had somehow sensed even in all my questioning adolescence that she wouldn’t give me any more information than what she’d already related.

“I need to check the perimeter,” I told Ben, and at once, I sensed the resistance in his posture, the way his shoulders seemed to tighten.

“Just the usual route,” I added, hoping that would be enough to reassure him I wasn’t planning anything crazy.

“The standing stones, the glade, back before noon.”